Music—Pink and Blue II
O’Keeffe, with Stieglitz [New York, NY; 1917]
Tonight, I’d paint the world
with a broom
and not be careful
of the floor. Sweep your wife,
your daughter, your any
other women
away. Here,
now, your body
shows me
how to play the notes,
not as written
but as meant
to be played: incantation,
duration, dissolution. Breath,
a circle with two
centers: each
cerulean reservoir; each
a seed syllable—creped bulbs:
vermillion, viridian, byzantium
white. In our hands,
a garden.
Self-Portrait in Absentia
Stieglitz, with O’Keeffe [New York, NY; 1918]
His eye was in him, and he used it on anything nearby. Maybe in that way he was always photographing himself.—O’Keeffe
I see you better than you see yourself.—Stieglitz, in a letter to O’Keeffe; 1918
Part that kimono so it frames you like a stage
curtain. Here, on this stool. Slump a bit.
Let’s take faces out of it. I’ll begin
where your breasts do & end
with your hips. Sag your stomach,
inhale to flatten—no matter;
I control the moment
of exposure. And in my jerry-rigged darkroom
across the hall—while you, in our studio,
remain naked & waiting—I decide
to overexpose the rift
between your thighs, leaving burnt
black absence where a presence
once had been. What lies
in that darkness is mine.
Opening night, I’ll wear you
on my arm; spin you like a child
playing pin-the-tail, with you
on every wall. You deny those faces
could possibly be yours, but
glassed and hung in the gallery
they become you—& you, them.
Composite [Self-]Portrait as Wise Desert Elder
O’Keeffe [Abiquiu, NM; 1976]
I was 32, and she was 79 . . . I took some pictures . . . [then the] game had ended, and I’d won.—photographer John Loengard
All these men
with cameras
in hand,
comparing the length
of their lenses.
I am not twenty-nine
anymore. I am no one’s
wife. I own
and abide in two
houses and inhabit
my face as fully.
In my desert,
I orchestrate
the light, seat
myself beneath
this cow skull.
I need them only
to take the picture.
Georgia O’Keeffe, by Alfred Stieglitz (Composite Portrait)
O’Keeffe [compiling Stieglitz’s early portraits of her into a book, Abiquiu, NM; 1978]
When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives.—O’Keeffe
Tilted black bowler,
white collar just so:
androgynous dandy,
fingers splayed
as any mouth
in amateur soft-core.
It was so much easier
to just disappear. One grows
tired of insisting.
Cowled scowler, arched
brow; propped against
a wooden wall, stuck
with hay and staples.
When we were just words,
I mailed him hasty bundles
of brown wrap and twine.
He shellacked my drawings
with fixative, chided me
a careless mother. But
the instant I gave them
to another’s eyes—even
his—they were no longer mine.
These portrait selves, the same.
Unheaded torso against
diaphanous screen,
pelvic jut and breast,
muscled chest, dark
rivers of thigh.
Public carapace, a surprising
relief. Aquifer-me freed
to branch subterranean.
While, overhead, the clicking
whisper of his acquisitive eye.
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Jessica Jacobs’ debut collection, Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O'Keeffe, is forthcoming from White Pine Press in 2015. Poems from this book have or will soon appear in journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, and Redivider. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, Editor of Sycamore Review, Acquisitions Editor, and now as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Hendrix College. She lives in Little Rock, AR with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown. (jessicalgjacobs.com)